Krieg
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: Head, shoulders, knees, and toes. Arthas and Ner'zhul.


Title: Krieg

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Warcraft

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Warcraft belongs to Blizzard Entertainment.

Summary: Head, shoulders, knees and toes. Arthas and Ner'zhul.

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- - - - -

i.

Arthas does not remember his mother.

Not that he has much business with her now. (_Something laughs nastily behind you, maybe inside you, and Frostmourne is cold on your hip._) Perhaps that is not entirely correct though: you have **everything** to do with the dead.

To be honest, the only thing that he can recall of her was her hair, and even that wasn't particularly special. Coarse, dirty blonde, very common looking. He had inherited it, of course, something he had resented as a child, when his hair would snag in the teeth of his comb (_like a mouth, chewing roots from your head. You found this funny in childhood, but the sensation and sound of tearing branches makes you wince._) But he knows that she was not a great beauty, and that her coarse hair was slung back in a clumsy braid on most days, as was the way of the kingdom of Stormwind, of the simpler girls from Lakeshire, and the eastern vales and emnets.

He's imagined beads in it before, a soft red ribbon, grass, everything perhaps. In this moment, that tangled mess of (_roots, like her body is_) hair could house the world.

He only thinks of this now, when the sun is setting far to the west and south of his seat, which is empty because he stands, a figure of metal and stone and ice. He could be a giant, with how long his shadow is cast against his tower, his glacier.

Arthas is suddenly very tired.

_It is just us. Me. You. Whatever we are now._

_The same._

Sometimes, Arthas is certain he cannot remember things because Ner'zhul pushes things around in his head to make room, and when he does not, he feels stifled, warm, trapped. He went on a hunting expedition in his youth down to the Stranglethorn Vale, as Anduin Lothar had done many years before. The lines that made his tent had felt very close then, marking his arms off from his body, feet just beyond the flap that kept the insects and small creatures from coming in. He was too big now for his hunting tent, a season of growth having come to him the winter before. His feet would have to remain outside. Arthas had not slept, imagining things coming up to his toes, his ankles, his heels, and nibbling off little bits of him, and he without the room in his tent to turn away, to withdraw into it like sea creatures did. Fourteen years, and still scared of invisible hands and darkness.

Had it actually been happening, he might have never felt anything at all, just the anticipation of it. Perhaps had something really meant to chew his feet out from beneath him,he would not have sense enough to know that it was happening.

_The same._

This is what Ner'zhul is to him. A secret dread. An inescapable hand. He cannot be rid of the feeling of fear, that one of them will oust the other. Someday, he will have to crush this out of him. Both the anticipation, and Ner'zhul. Arthas does not share, and his heart grows less charitable the more he feels it harden with the ice, until it feels like little more than a rock that is stuck somewhere between his shield arm and sternum.

Only one of them may rule. There is no sharing between the two of them.

But like Ner'zhul, Arthas has nothing that makes him the more substantial of the two other than a vague burning that might have been ambition once upon a time. There is nothing but cold blood in him now, moving sluggishly beneath his armor and paper-white skin. (_Sometimes, if you are quiet, you can catch Ner'zhul thinking about his once brown skin, and the foreignness of yours; you find it funny. He is a stranger in the strange land that makes your five and twenty self_.)

For now, the two of them shift against the other clumsily, like the glaciers. They are both indomitably cold giants, and crush anything that comes before or between them. Arthas can only laugh, deep under the threads that tie them together, at Ner'zhul's insistence.

_The same._

Hardly, Arthas thinks, and gains enough control to run plated fingers through his dirty hair. He cannot remember his mother, and that frustrates him as he pulls a snarl out from the white and frost of his locks.

- - - - -

ii.

They are both always looking for some form of control over the other. In this, Arthas has had no advantages. Ner'zhul has no eyes, hands, bones, heart to break, and what little does remain of him reminds him of mist. Smoke, he amends, because it burns for all of its blackness and cold. Arthas can do little to his meanness.

He suspects Ner'zhul enjoys this.

He knows his own weaknesses, though they grow fainter each day, because he is forgetting pain and faces and anything else that might have been important. Just yesterday (_The day before? A week before? How long have you been here anyway?_) he had been thinking of his sister, and how her eyes had been cornflower blue when she held him, so much older than him, and had loved her the distant way that he loves ideals. With no more than a tatter of thought, Ner'zhul had pushed her aside from his mind, and he could no longer recall her name.

"Take your amusements where you can," he said benignly, grinding his teeth.

_I take them anywhere I want._

Arthas scowls at this, and shifts angrily against the scraping metal and ice. Privately, in that corner of his mind that is still his and his alone, he knows that Ner'zhul will do just that. Another thing stolen from him, another point to Ner'zhul. He would laugh at the absurdity of their little game were it not so direly important to himself that he wins.

He flexes a hand, and clenches. A smile, albeit a very bitter one.

Let Ner'zhul have his little points. Arthas knows he will own this body yet. With every thing that he allows to escape, another strength comes in its stead. He can almost feel his own legs, and move them without the phantom orc's presence.

(_What then?_)

Arthas almost doesn't dare think of any sort of freedom.

- - - - -

iii.

Without Ner'zhul, Arthas does not know how the Scourge will behave.

He certainly has no plans of leaving it, oh no, not when his fist is clenching around the heart of it. But he wants it to be his, a conquered kingdom of sorts. He is in the business of battle, and beneath his feet and in the palm of his hand lies an army that cannot be imagined. Their brutality and wickedness is too real for such trifling thoughts.

Arthas loves them, in a way that he supposes only someone like himself can. They are not wholly unlike animals. They eat, and when they do not eat, they wait until the next time that the opportunity arises. They depend on him in their entirety, and would obey unquestioningly for the chance to pass his cloying presence. The Lich King is their wholeness, something that they cannot reach without that constant pressure in their very being. (_People always had hollows; you and your plague reach inside them and tear it wider until it drains the whole._)

He recalls lessons from before now, tutors that he had as an aspiring squire. They said that man and animal alike were made of of pieces of pieces of pieces, and that each one could be broken down. Arthas could believe this. What was muscle but a bundle of threads, held together by the toughness of his flesh​? He had cut himself enough, and deeply enough to see the striations.

Trees, he had said, and thought himself a coiled, grained wood. Pale like an ash tree, but the heart flesh dark and full of rich sap.

In every particle of the Scourge, he imagines, Ner'zhul is written there. He himself wonders at times if it is not the same for him. Without Ner'zhul, does the cancer die and fade out, or take the whole being with it? And is it those pieces that make the immortality of the Scourge, the endless undeath that Arthas needs?

He doubts. It is enough to make him hesitate.

Lesser beasts would have killed him for it. As it is, Ner'zhul is only quiet and content.

- - - - -

iv.

Sometimes Ner'zhul is unhappy in a way that Arthas recognizes as grief. Despite the constant anger and scheming of the lich orc, there lies an undercurrent that only Arthas can feel, and he knows he is resented for it.

Sometimes he gathers flashes of scenery from Ner'zhul's memory. Lush plains, pelt tents, the smell of earth and water. But more often than not he sees from the corner of his eye the brown skin of another orc. A female. Arthas presumes Ner'zhul sees her as well. After all, they share the same eyes and skin. (_Somehow, you think Ner'zhul owes it to you to give you something for it_.)

He is never given a name for her, but he will not push now. He has other things to worry about. He has regicide on the mind again.

She is attractive in a dark sort of way, he supposes, with coal hair and tawny skin. She would blend into the walls of a cave, or the flatness of a river basin if she could but reach it. (_The image of the river __basin makes Ner'zhul shudder somewhere inside, and wrath burns against the inside of your eyelids. He means to punish you. He would hate you if you were not him. Maybe he hates you anyway_.) She skirts away from him, and Arthas is certain she knows when he is the one that is strongest in presence. Even then, he oftentimes wonders if she is not some memory that Ner'zhul invokes deliberately.

She is dead, he knows that much. And she is not real.

_Summoning your resolve? _he thinks. _That's okay, I suppose not all of us can choose for ourselves the power offered to us. You cannot be strong without the memory of your hate. I know what that's like. I did. _

_You would be the same._

_I thought we **are** the same._

The orc woman disappears again. Arthas and Ner'zhul, however, pay it no mind. Ner'zhul is the cold burning in the back of their throat, the stinging of their eyelids and the fever hotness on their cheeks. Arthas has not known tears since before the Plague (_after **she** left you, with Uther and the others and looked ** so disappointed**._) He does not pretend to know Ner'zhul's either.

Another victory to Arthas, even if it does feel a little hollow. He will take them where he can get them, and he will not let the remnant of a human heart get in the way of that.

- - - - -

v.

Neither really pretends to be stronger than the other. Each one is, in his own way, the superior being. When titans such as themselves clash, they do not need words or bodies, just the push of one mind against another. When they push hard enough, Arthas can almost hear the click of their different selves coming together, and that is when they are whole.

"It is unfortunate," he muses one evening, and Ner'zhul is bent on him, mind far away from the forces in the Plaguelands or the assaults occurring daily in Tirisfal. (_You laugh when the two of you first hear of this. "Oh how precious!" you cried, gleeful. "Sylvanas the Banshee Queen and her Forsaken. A remnant of the Scourge that does not even have the decency to fade away when no longer useful. I wonder, how does it feel to be sentient of their undeath? Do they shudder at themselves? Do they meet their children and friends that lived and feel shame? Resentment?"_

"_We will have to catch one," he said, and Ner'zhul, filling his heart, coldly agreed._)

"It is unfortunate," he repeats, "that neither one of us can enjoy this synchronicity. Did you know? Gnomes make timepieces, water clocks in particular. I think of them often lately. I had one once I think, made of iron and sea water. I know it could not have been yours instead, because there are no water clocks in Draenor."

Ner'zhul shifts, and Arthas can only see from one eye for a moment. The lich does not appreciate being mocked.

"Good frame, but the engineer in question was perhaps a bit mad. Sea water evaporates quickly. Too many minerals or some such. Left the frame hollow, but made a beautiful sound when a wind would pass through it emptiness. Remind you of anyone?"

He laughs, and Ner'zhul, in part, laughs with him. Again, he is unsure who wins. Best that he can tell, maybe they are both losing. It's frightening to consider. He puts a hand on Frostmourne and takes comfort in its cold clawing.

- - - - -

vi.

The Silver Hand is caught making efforts in the eastern remnants of Lordaeron, and with a thought, the Lich King sends the inhabitants of Stratholme into a growing restlessness, rattling their finger bones and teeth against the iron bars of the gates, pressing like a swell against them until they spill into the towns.

The Lich King sends the orders. Not Arthas. Not Ner'zhul. That clicking the minds together happens, and they cast aside their selves to make the better whole no matter the reservations of each. (_Though you do suspect Ner'zhul would slide into such a role, such a collective without the hesitation you experience. You are still vain enough to want to be the prince and the king at once. In a way, you are_.)

Kel'thuzad, wavering and cold, is before them, and he is speaking, and neither is attending as they should. Arthas and Ner'zhul are aware of each other, and anything else is superfluous.

"If it is not one war, it is another!" he says, and Kel'thuzad looks at him curiously. Perhaps the undead sorcerer fancies himself a part of this joke, because he smiles cruelly, and only speaks more of the victories Naxxramas has held against the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn. This is funnier still, and Arthas can for a moment only think **I killed you**.

Together, they are laughing, and no one outside of their shell will understand. Rare synchronicity in their hollowness.

- - - - -

End.

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End file.
